How did Britain secure its hold on India, and what colonial policies led to the beginning of Indian Nationalism?

The advent of the British in India

The British rule was established in India with the victory in the battle of Plassey in 1757. This was a decisive victory for the East India company lead by Robert Clive. The Nawab of Bengal Siraj-Ud-Daulah's army was defeated and a puppet was installed in his place by the British. The East India Company gained the Diwani rights, or the right to collect taxes directly from the people on behalf of the Emperor from the eastern province of Bengal-Bihar-Orissa. This marked the advent of British rule in India for the next 2 centuries till 1947. India was under the East India company till 1857, when the Queen of England Alexandrina Victoria declared India as a crown colony and its citizens as her subjects.

Conquest of Knowledge

At no point in time, there were no more than 100,000 Brits in India during the 200 years of their hegemony. So the question is how were they able to control such a vast country? There are many reasons why the British were able to gain their stronghold in India, like having a tactical system of administration, using cruel policies like divide and rule, communal and religious oppression, etc. But the most obvious reason which is not evident at the outset but tacitly the backbone of the Raj is Conquest of Knowledge.

Until the British arrived in India, Indian society was a place that allowed ambiguity, the practice of documenting history in literary texts was not present. The knowledge of the past was passed on to generation after generations through the oral route. The most prominent Indian texts “The Vedas” originally were not written texts, they were passed through the oral tradition. The main sources' of history of the subcontinent until then were narratives and accounts of Greek, Chinese and Parsi travelers like Faxian, Xuanzang, Ferdowsi, and through narratives of ministers in the courts of the Afghani emperors Muhammad of Ghor and Mahmud of Ghazni. There was not a single source of Indian origin that reflected in its narratives history of the Sub Continent.

The British were left unsettled by this and they took upon themselves the project of penning down the history of India. The first books on the history of India divided Indian history into 3 eras:

1.      The Hindu Era

2.      The Muslim Era

3.      The British Era

This seems to be all right at first glance, but upon deeper examination, when the first 2 eras were carved on religion and the third should follow suit, then it should be the Christian Era. Although Christianity proliferated in India under the British, they were personifying themselves as the rulers of Law with an obligation of the establishment of rule of Law and order. With this idea, the British created a body of knowledge which were founding pillars of the rational for the British rule and created a framework of policies and regulations with a Eurocentric ideology.

Orientalism

In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay in his minutes on Indian education wrote “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.” This created a system of Education in India with an Orientalist idealogy where the orientalist was patronized by the Oxidant. Edward Said in his book Orientalism in 1978, wrote “Orientalism is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous” So the minds of young Indian children were being shaped in Brtish Indiana schools about the superiority of the white race over the black. So the ideological framework for the cause of the existence of the British Raj was being created with no opposition.

Divide and Rule

The British in India recognized the communal and religious differences between the Hindus and Muslims in India and exploited it. The repercussions of this are still evident to this date with the constant political tensions between India and Pakistan and internal Hindu Muslim conflicts. When the British recognized a piece of land with a diverse population of Hindus and Muslims, they employed the policy of creating communal tensions between the two ethnic and religious classes which led to violent religious conflicts and the British gained over the unstable region and gained power.

There were numerous other reasons which were responsible for the establishment of British rule in India, but trailing the body of knowledge they created here. So all these factors together led to the thriving of the British Raj in India and the subsequent looting of India.

How did British policy in India change as a result of the Sepoy Rebellion?

The sepoy mutiny of 1857 was a first large scale nationwide Rebellion of Indian troops against the east India company. The backdrop of the Sepoy mutiny:

By the 1840s the East India Company was in power in most parts of India. The few regions which were still being governed by Independent rules were Awadh in Northern India, Kashmir, a few parts of southern India. The East India Company was the new sovereign of the Sub Continent and created laws such as the doctrine of paramountcy and doctrine of lapse. They stated that any princely state of India without a biological legal male biological heir made the Indian princes, a vassal of the British, thus, the umbrella of protection, that this paramountcy gave to the princely states, would be no more, and hence lapse into the British.

The largest of this annexation was the empire of Awadh in northern India, where the British appointed resident commented on the incompetency of Nawab of Awadh and he was sacked and the Awadh ceded into the British territory. A series of events and the culminating incident at the Bengal regiment where a cartridge introduced to the Enfield rifle was greased in pig and cow fat should be bitten by mouth to pull the cover away which would be highly offensive to Muslims and Hindus. As they were forced to use the cartridge, they resisted and a sepoy named Pandey rebelled by shooting a British sergeant-major and a lieutenant. This culminated in a large apprising led by the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar.

The sepoy mutiny brought an end to the East India Company in India. As the revolt grew larger and larger, there were not enough troops at the disposal of the East India Company to defend the territory, so it approached the British Empire in England for artillery support. All the bureaucrats in Britain were surprised at this request as they were unaware of the activities of the East India Company in India who were chartered as traders to East India. As soon as the revolt was suppressed a committee was established to look into the matters of administration of India and decided to oust the east India Company form power. India has declared a crown colony and the Queen proclaimed herself as the supreme sovereign of India in 1871. The after-effects of the Crowned colony:

 ·    The administration of India was modified. A viceroy was created for India replacing the governor-general was the representative of the monarch of the United Kingdom in India and followed the Queen's orders.

·        As India was declared as a crown colony and its citizens as the Queen's subjects, they were supposed to be treated equally with the British citizens and a whole host of reforms were created like the Statistical Survey of India, the trigonometric Survey of India, the Peoples project of India, etc

·        Indians were granted the right to education in European educational institutions

Though the reforms were decreed to do social welfare in India, the implementation of the reforms was left to the British officials in India most of whom were the previous officials of East India company who didn’t do justice to the reforms and led to the degradation of India.

How did imperialism contribute to the growth and globalization of the world economy?

I beg to disagree with the above statement of growth. The whole idea of an imperialist form of rule was to loot the colony and transfer the wealth to the sovereign nation. Imperialism led to the creation of new cities in India like Bombay, Madras, etc which were port towns that enabled easy transportation of inland goods and wealth to Europe. The port towns grew with the establishment of new industries like textile mills. But the previous existing indigenous industries of India like the Weaver communities and local traders were destroyed and were decreed to stop weaving of cloth.

As the port towns grew in prosperity, the British officials living in those cities grew wealthier and needed workers and peasantry to do their daily chores. This led to the migration of workers to the cities. This led to overcrowding of cities and the lower classes lacked proper housing and sanitation facilities, These places became the breeding grounds of epidemic and pandemic diseases in the years to come. The legacy of this policy is visible in today's Bombay which hosts the world's largest slum “Dharavi”.

With the creation of railways in India, the British claimed this to be their prestigious achievement in the development of India, but on the Hindsight, no Indian or colored person was allowed to board into the first and privileged classes of the coach which were reserved for the white race. Indians were left to overcrowd themselves in 3rd class compartments with no seating. This led to the outbreak and transfer of the epidemic of influenza in the 1920s.

When the British empire declared the reconstruction of Delhi in 1905 and decreed upon the chief architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker, the newly constructed regions of Delhi with roads meeting at right angles with wide boulevards and big buildings and bungalows were reserved to the British aristocracy. During the Census Reports of India 1921, the population density of New Delhi was 10 persons per hectare but the population density of old Delhi was 2000 per SQ Km. This is a staunch statement for the exploitation of India under the garb of development.

Although the imperial rule shifted the Economy of India from an inward market to an outward and global market, most of the revenues of the trade were used to empower the British in India or was transferred to Britain and Europe.